> but this is not the same as them being bad. Well obviously, there is no such thing as "being bad" as an intrinsic quality. All "badness" or "goodness" is ext

> but this is not the same as them being bad. Well obviously, there is no such thing as "being bad" as an intrinsic quality. All "badness" or "goodness" is extrinsic, so it should have been fairly clear what I meant. ("This is bad" = "I think this is bad".) > This is only the simplest case imaginable. And in this case I disagree with you. I question whether or not legal accessibility requirements have been a good thing for society. As an example, I used to live in an old university building that was legally required to have a sort of wheelchair lift on some stairs to a commons room. The university had to pay close to $300,000 for that machine. In the two years I lived there, I do not believe the machine was used once. Was it really worth a good 35 years worth of in-state tuition scholarships to pay for a wheelchair lift that no one ever used? > sustained economic or societal "subsidization" that has observable, long-lasting negative effects? While it's impossible to isolate this policy as a causative factor, almost all European countries have drastically inferior GDPPC (adjusted for exchange rates and purchasing power) to the USA. It's also not very hard to see how encouraging people to leave the workforce for months at a time would hurt productivity.